


Go No More A-Roving

by Thea_Bromine



Series: Dead!Giles Universe [1]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Character Death, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-02
Updated: 2014-02-02
Packaged: 2018-01-10 22:52:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 20,185
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1165547
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thea_Bromine/pseuds/Thea_Bromine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the Watcher’s death, Spike decides to go home.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Giles

**Author's Note:**

> Chapter warnings: illness, sentiment, and pregnancy. Also theology.
> 
>  
> 
> [](https://www.flickr.com/photos/125573331@N03/16506553719)  
> 

He could almost have laughed, if it hadn’t hurt so much and left him so breathless, at the way they were all totally like themselves.

Buffy came in like a whirlwind, told him about patrols and demons and shoes, with as much emphasis on the latter as on the former, and whirled out again, promising to come again soon and stay for longer. She made his head ache, but he disguised it, still.

Willow came with her arms full of books; some of them she left for him, and sometimes, when he felt strong enough, he read a page or two. He didn’t think she knew how little he could manage now before his wrists wouldn’t take the weight, and his eyes refused to focus.

Dawn came in, complaining, trying to get him to take her side in some disagreement with Buffy, as she had done for a decade at least, coaxing him to back her up.

Faith came, quarrelled with Buffy, sniped at him, and left again. They all apologised for her and put it down to her condition.

Xander came in cracking ridiculous jokes, always armed with some high sugar snack, always full of how some escapade had _nearly_ gone wrong, always casting himself as the comic relief. That had annoyed him for years and it still did: not the jokes but the constant self-deprecation. He had said so more than once; now was not the time to raise it again.

They all assured him, at first, that he looked much better and that he would be out and bossing them about in no time. He knew better. He had known as soon as the first symptoms appeared. The Giles men were not long-lived, and this had taken his father and his grandfather. It was no surprise that it would take him. He had thought he was prepared for it.

They, on the other hand, were not.

He knew when the doctor had taken them aside and spelled things out. He knew, because they… changed, and because others came then, too, warned, he thought, probably by Willow.

Buffy still talked of demons and vampires and patrols, but also of Potentials and plans. Her talk was less about what she was doing and more about what she ought to do. Eventually, she faced him, with the raw courage she had shown against the Master however many years before, and with the emotional blindness that casually assumed his courage would match hers and take the same form. “I said… I said when… How many times did I say that I can’t do this without you?”

He smiled at her. “But you can.”

She looked at him, unmoving, for a long breath. Then she nodded. “I don’t want to.”

“I can’t say I want you to either,” he pointed out mildly. “But it’s not up to us. So you will.”

“Why should I?” she asked him, sullenly. “Because it’s my duty? Nobody ever asked me if I was willing. Because there’s nobody else? There are other people to do it now.”

“Because it’s what we do, Buffy. Watchers and Slayers come and go, but Watching and Slaying remain. I did it before you, you’ll do it after me.”

“Maybe I won’t,” she muttered. “Maybe I’ll quit.”

He didn't dignify that with a response and after a moment she looked sideways at him. “And maybe I’ll go on doing it. But I’m not having Wesley.” Then she leaned over and rested her cheek against his chest. “I’ll do it because it’s _you_ who’s asking. No other reason.”

He recognised it for the enormous compliment that it was. “I knew I could trust you.”

“Always,” she muttered into his pyjama top, and he smiled and touched her hair.

Willow came, still armed with books, but now she wanted to pick his brains, and because he knew it mattered, he exerted himself to the ends of his failing strength in order to give her all the knowledge he had. All the things he had tried to teach her and failed, she now wanted to learn, and he hid the cost of the teaching as best he could. She wasn’t fooled; one night she burst into tears and said something into the hand she was pressing against her mouth. He picked out the word ‘Nimue’.

“I like Niniane better.”

She looked at him, slow tears spilling down her cheeks and her mouth twisting, and he held out his arms. She was a bigger armful than Buffy, heavier, broader, but less physical. She felt like a woman; Buffy always felt like a Slayer. “Willow, in at least half the versions, Merlin knows what Nimue is doing. I know. And I like the versions where he not only knows, he encourages her.” He leaned his mouth into her hair and spoke, muffled through the red strands. “Whatever I have, is yours. Take it, darling girl. When I’m past being able to give it, you have my permission to take it. Take it all.”

They managed nothing more that night; she wept herself limp against him, and he was more exhausted than he wanted her to see.

Dawn came in silence, most unlike her. He could see she had been crying, but for once, at last, she didn’t chirp at him about how he would soon be coming home. It was a relief: his breath came shorter and shorter now and he couldn’t possibly have summoned the energy to bring her to an admission of how few days he had left. He didn’t even know if he had the right to force her to acknowledge it. She knew, and he knew she knew; if she couldn’t speak the words even to herself, who was he to say them for her? But she didn’t speak: she climbed carefully onto the bed beside him and lay down, her head on his shoulder, her fingers entwined in his, and then she simply stayed, mute. He could feel her heartbeat, strong and steady; he didn’t know if she could feel the stuttering of his.

Wesley came, flying four thousand miles from Cochabamba armed with the latest amulet or weapon or whatever, trying to say that he’d called in on his way home to London. He said he had messages from the Council, but then he smiled shyly at Buffy, and claimed to have forgotten them. When Xander came in, Wesley jumped, stared hard at him for a moment, and glanced back at Giles, his chin lifting in a tiny nod.

Faith came, cursing at the stairs, surprising herself as well as him when she sank into the chair, looked at him and burst into noisy choking sobs.  He almost fell out of bed trying to reach her, and she flung herself on him, clutching, hurting him, not that he would ever have told her so. She pushed her wet face into his neck, and he patted her awkwardly, until she stilled and drew back, refusing to meet his eyes as she searched through her bag for tissues and lipstick.

“Sorry, G. It’s the hormones.”

It might even have been true. He looked at her taut bump. “Not long now?”

“Another month.” Her belly rippled and he made a sound of surprise; she laughed. “Wanna touch?”

He had never seen the appeal before of touching a pregnant woman’s bump, but now he looked eagerly at her, and she laughed again and guided his hand to the source of the movement. “He thinks he’s an acrobat.”

He was fascinated. “Doesn’t that hurt?”

“Only when he trampolines on my bladder or gets stuck under my ribs and can’t turn over.”

“He? You think it’s a boy? I know you, you said you didn’t want to find out.”

She made a face. “I have to have extra scans, ‘cause I’m old for a first baby. Last one, you could see. No denying it. Boy.”

And he would never… “Have you chosen a name?”

Her face crumpled again and he let his hand slide away from her stomach to draw her to him. “Promise me something, Faith? Promise me you won’t call him Rupert. Bloody ridiculous name.”

He felt her mouth turn up against his neck. “Steven. We both like it.” She sat up again and reached a second time for tissues. “We haven’t decided on a second name, but I think if I suggested Steven Giles… I think that might be… Giles is a boy’s name in England, right?”

He nodded. “I would like that.” This baby, Steven Giles or not, was already mentioned in his will. He could do no more.     

He was both surprised and not surprised when Angel came, late in the day, well past visiting hours, slipping unseen through the echoing hospital and hesitating at Giles’ door. The knock was only a polite tap on the doorframe, the same as most of the others did, but unlike the others, Angel stopped in the doorway.

“May I come in?”

He would have laughed, but by now, laughing hurt too much to be attempted. “A hospital is a public place. I can’t stop you.”

Nonetheless, Angel waited; it was most of a minute before Giles looked at him again. “Come in. Sit. Don’t loom over me.” The silence was not comfortable and in the end he had to make another effort to speak. “What do you want? I don’t have time to wait you out.”

For all that, it was another minute before Angel spoke. “Absolution.”

“Generalised? I can’t give it.”

Angel shifted, graceful and easy, still young, still beautiful, still, Giles thought with irritation, thinking that it was all about him and his tortured conscience. “Specific.”

It was Giles’ turn to be silent. This time Angel caved. “I’ve come to ask for your forgiveness.”

Giles snorted. “What, out loud, in words?”

Angel flinched, but he met Giles’ gaze. “For whatever harm I did you. For what Angelus did.”

Giles looked away. “As long as you’re saying that Angelus wasn’t you, then no.”

“For what I did to you, both as Angel and as Angelus. You’re right, of course; it was me.”

Giles closed his eyes. Something about Angel always seemed to bring them to long speeches, and he was too tired, but, but…

“Years ago I heard a famous theologian talking about forgiveness. He said - I’m paraphrasing - that most people didn’t understand that there were differences between forgiveness, reconciliation and pardon. People talked about forgiveness as if it was part of the relationship between the offender and whoever they had offended, and he said it’s not. He said it was part of your relationship with,” and he grimaced, “your god. He said forgiveness was to do with… bugger, I can’t do this without California-speak. With letting go of baggage. To forgive was to let go of the need for revenge, the desire to hurt back. The anger. The hatred. He saw it as putting the whole thing into the hands of your god to deal with.” He opened his eyes; Angel was frowning. “In the absence of a belief in a beneficent and _involved_ god - you know how I feel about that - it would be the act, I suppose, of,” and his nose wrinkled with his dislike of the phrase, “moving on. I did that long since, Angel. I had to. When you came back after, after that time, when Buffy chose you over me, I hated you. For a while I hated her. I couldn’t live that way. I couldn’t do my job, and to begin with that was how I forced myself to move past what you had done. I couldn’t do my job, which was bigger and more important than you or me or even Buffy, with you taking up space in my head. I evicted you because it was necessary for my job. Later I understood that evicting you was the best thing for me, for my sanity. For my emotional health. As far as that goes, yes, I’ve forgiven you. But I think that isn’t what you’re asking for.”

Angel looked down. “No.”

“Reconciliation, he said, was fixing the damaged relationship. The difference between that and forgiveness was that forgiveness was entirely in my own hands. Reconciliation was in yours as well. Reconciliation required acknowledgement by the offender of the offence, and repentance.”

“I did you harm, Giles, personally and as a Watcher. I’m sorry for it. I would put it right if I could. I’ve tried to… but I can’t, can I? She’s dead.”

“And you’re asking me because you can’t ask her,” Giles observed shrewdly. “This is about her, more than it is about me, isn’t it? I can’t help you with that. I don’t have the right.”

Angel’s head tipped forward, but Giles hadn’t finished. “The third factor was pardon. He said that when most people talked about forgiveness, they meant pardon. Pardoning someone was when you released them from the consequences of what they had done, even if the consequences were only…” He stopped to cough; after a moment, Angel came to the bed, and slid an arm under him, lifting him with embarrassing ease and supporting him until the paroxysm passed. “Only sharp words and dirty looks.” He lay back, limply. “For whatever lies between _us_ , Angel, you and me, either way, that was badly done, or done in malice,” he coughed again, and waved Angel away, “I’ll give you my pardon and ask for yours.” 

He was embarrassed by the ease that followed its granting.

Xander came one day, unusually sombre. It had been a bad day; his cough had been troubling him, and everything ached. He had turned the light away from his bed because it made his eyes hurt; even the dull hospital colours seemed painfully vibrant. He wasn’t sure that he had the strength for the habitual Xander, but he would have to try. Xander, though, stood at his window for several minutes, looking into a concrete quadrangle and when he spoke, he didn’t turn.

“Tony’s dead.”

It took him a moment to catch up. “Your father? I’m sorry. Is it… was it unexpected?”

Still Xander didn’t look round. “Only by him. Cirrhosis. Everybody’s known for three years that his liver was shot. Happens when the only thing you drink is cheap bourbon. He’s no great loss.”

He winced at that. “More than you think, perhaps. I know your relationship wasn’t wonderful, but allow yourself to mourn anyway. I, I, I found when my own father died - and you know we had been, been estranged for some time - that what I grieved for wasn’t the relationship we had, but the one I wished we could have had.  For all that you, that you didn’t have many dealings with him now, he was your father. He was part of your life.”

Xander turned then. “No. He was my sperm donor, that’s all. He was never part of my life, never an important part. When I was a kid, I used to wish that he wasn’t my father. I used to look at older guys, and imagine which of them might be my father instead. I had a great selection of fathers - Willow’s dad, for a bit. Mr Carreras from the elementary school. Coach Hawkins. Any number of famous actors or singers or celebrities. They were gonna come and take me away, and I was gonna live in a big white house, with a swimming pool and a puppy and a bicycle on which all of the gears worked. My dad was gonna love me, and there wasn’t gonna be any more yelling, no more fighting, no more hitting. He’d see to it that I had the stuff I needed. When I was ten, I worked out that my father wasn’t gonna come. I was gonna live in Sunnydale and never do anything worthwhile. I was never gonna amount to anything; everybody said so.”

He winced again, and his breath rattled in his chest. He didn’t dare speak, for fear of losing his English reserve in the face of this man’s pain.

“I was sixteen when my dad came. I didn’t know he was my dad: he didn’t look like any of the ones I had imagined. I… was twenty when I worked it out. That my dad saw something in me, that he thought I could do stuff. That I could do… that he could teach me to do stuff. He believed I could… I dunno, he believed I could wire a lamp, or build a wall, or, or read a big book about demons, or use a sword or a crossbow. That I wasn’t a complete loser.” He looked away, and the tension hummed. “There was still the yelling, but… it was just the normal yelling that every dad does with every teenager who knows everything and won’t be told anything. There was no hitting. No real fighting. I don’t know if he knew… if he knew he was my dad.”

He told himself that the hoarseness was the natural result of his illness. “He knew.”

“’Cause, you know, not like it was any epic win for him, to get a dorky guy with…”

“Every Watcher wants to know that his son or his daughter will be a Watcher in turn. To see it happen, to see his son ready to take over the Slayer, to know that my Slayer will be safe because my son will be her Watcher…”

He saw the battle between denial and acceptance, saw acceptance triumph. “She’ll be safe.”

“Even without that, Xander, I would count it as an ‘epic win’.” He said it steadily and deliberately, and Xander came hesitatingly to the side of the bed and knelt to look into his face. He set one thin hand over Xander’s broad, brown ones. “I would be proud of my son even if he were a brickie, rather than a Watcher. I am.”

When the dark head bent to rest on his fingers, he set the other hand on top, unable to speak the benediction, but knowing it was understood. He even managed to laugh when Xander said unsteadily, “You owe me a puppy.”

There were others who came, so he wasn’t surprised to become _aware_ of the presence in his room. The nurse had been in, fussing at him, settling him for the night; he waited for a good five minutes after the sound of her footsteps had died away before he said wearily, “I know you’re there; show yourself.”


	2. Spike 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Spike being annoying, and death. Deathfic, remember?

The Watcher looked like shit, frankly. Not surprising, really. He was half the size he should be, gone to bone and stubbornness, as if he hadn’t always had enough of that for any two men. He came out of the shadows - sometimes, when it came to hiding, being a demon was really useful. He’d got into the hospital the night before, and spent the day watching - hah! - from places well clear of any windows. He’d seen the visitors come and go, he’d seen what they hadn’t - that when they left, they took the Watcher’s strength with them. He was giving them the last of himself, and they didn’t see it. He dropped into the chair that Harris had left by the bed, and propped one foot on the other knee, cocking his head and inspecting the man under the sheet.

“Peaches was here.”

Giles nodded.

“To make peace? Weep on yer manly bosom over how much he wronged you?”

Nod, with a hint of a conspiratorial grin.

“I’ve not come for that.”

“Thank all the gods and goddesses for small mercies,” said Giles, piously. Spike sniggered.

“Thought I’d give you the opportunity to apologise for chainin’ me up in yer bathtub.”

Giles snorted. “Feel free to wait.”

Spike slumped lower in the chair. He was gagging for a fag, but setting off the smoke alarms probably wouldn’t help. “Odd time, that. Vampire living wi’ a Watcher.”

“It’s a comfort to me that I’ll never have to repeat it.”

“Yeah, an’ me an’ all. But we managed O.K..”

“If by that you mean that you drove me to the very verges of insanity, stole my Scotch, mis-shelved my books, kept me awake, ruined my furnishings and insulted my friends, then yes, I suppose we did.”

“Hey! I thought we bonded over _Passions_!”

Giles sniffed. “Why did we watch that crap?”

“’Cos the internet hadn’t made it all the way to the Giles mentality so we couldn’t listen to _The Archers_.”

He got another smile for that.

“Don’t miss yer flat at all.”

“I’m not sure that, that I do, actually.”

“You had the most borin’ selection of books I’d ever seen. Well, except for the ones in the shoe box under yer bed.”

“I did notice that you always put them back in the wrong order.”

Spike grinned. “Wondered if you had. But otherwise, Rupert, yer reading material was crap.”

Giles smiled but he said no more.

“There was one big blue book,” said Spike, reminiscently, “about the actual mechanics of biting. It was less borin’ than the rest, I suppose.”

“Marcus Idacius? I might have known you would find that one; what were you doing anyway? I thought you already knew how to bite?”

“Yeah: give ‘em the glamour so they don’t struggle, game face, fangs in, blood out, let go. Bringin’ them over had a bit more to it, but actually, I didn’t do that often.”

“Not many Spike-fledges?”

“Not somethin’ that worked well for me. But there was more to it, accordin’ to that book. I didn’t know all that stuff about the vampire Eumachia and the Watcher Tanicius. Well, I knew her end of it; didn’t know his. Daft bugger he was: he should have known all along that she wasn’t human.”

Giles smiled. “I always thought so.”

“Was that true, though, about her killin’ him fer love?”

“Who knows? She had offered to bring him over several times, and he always refused. In the end, she killed him, I think that’s a fact. Who’s to say why she did it? But all the versions I’ve seen – there’s more than just that one – said that she killed him for love. Pity, if you like.”

“She the first vampire with a soul?”

Giles shifted, and Spike waited.

“I… wondered. You read it that way too? I’ve never heard it put forward as a theory, but… yes, I wondered. Is, does, is there anything about them in vampire lore?”

“Always chasing down the clues, Rupert? Even now?”

Giles closed his eyes. “When nothing is interesting any more, you might as well be dead.”

“Well, there are stories suggestin’ she went peculiar, but I’ve not heard anythin’ about a soul. Anyway, there was nobody to do it, and it ain’t real clear how it could be done. Gen’rally people - vampires - think she just went soft. She couldn’t bear to see him go, an’ she wanted to turn him. That bit’s the same as in yer book. But he kept sayin’ no. The thing about her killin’ him, I didn’t know why she did it. Always heard he was wounded, an’ bleedin’ on her, with the usual consequences. She went rogue - from a vampire point of view - after he died, which was what made me wonder if it was a soul. Doesn’t sound like it did her much good, if it _was_ a soul: Tanicius’s Slayer got her in the end. She might have been a vampire, but she was an idiot as well.”

“The two are not mutually exclusive.”

“Watchers can be idiots too.”

“I’m not denying it.”

“You do think she got a soul? How?”

Giles managed a faint shrug; Spike could see that the slightest inessential movement was all but beyond him now. “If you’ve read that text, and you’ve heard the vampire end of the story, your guess will be as good as mine. Probably better.”

“You never followed it up?”

“Nothing to follow. I could guess now, particularly given what we know about Angel and Angelus, but when I read the book, I suspected she _might_ have had a soul, but I didn’t _know._ And without that, it’s…”

“Yeah. Standard ‘vamp gets boy, vamp loses boy, vamp gets boy back, vamp bites boy’ story.”

They were silent for a while; presently there were footsteps outside and Spike moved to the wall. A small, rather harrassed nurse slipped quietly in, carrying a cup of tea. Giles turned his head and smiled wearily at her. “It’s all right, I’m not asleep.”

She smiled back. “I didn’t think you would be. Shift change in half an hour; I came to see if you needed anything before then.”

“Only that, if it’s for me. Thank you.”

“You’re not in pain?”

“Just tired.”

“Want a sleeping pill?”

He shook his head.

“Well, let somebody know if you change your mind.” She scuttled away again and Spike eased back to his seat.

“Drink yer tea while it’s hot, Rupert.” He watched through lowered lashes, and when the cup began to tremble, he got up and sat on the bed, matter-of-factly wrapping his hand around Giles’. When Giles sighed and let his head drop back, he set the cup back on the bed table.

“Bad sign when an Englishman can’t finish a cuppa. Time was, you were keeping the Jacksons of Piccadilly in the style an’ all that. Remember that from before. Remember…”

“I remember,” said Giles, with a tinge of acidity.

“Yeah, well, mebbe you don’t remember what I do, Rupert. I remember bein’ shit scared because the only thing keepin’ me safe from the people tryin’ to kill me outside was the man inside who was usually tryin’ to kill me too. I remember being bloody terrified of that thing in my head. I remember a man who was as frightened of me as I was of the crazy soldiers.”

“I was not!”

“Tell it to the Marines, Rupert. Vampire senses over here. You were scared of me, and yeah, O.K., you had cause. An’ I’m not saying I liked the bathtub an’ I still reckon the handcuffs were an over-reaction, but, well, you took me in an’ you didn’t have to. You saw that I got fed - crap animal blood, but yeah, I do get that fresh human blood isn’t that easy to lay hand on, even for a Watcher. I got fed. An’ yeah, I do know that I irritated you.”

“Oh, did you ever.”

“I’m good at it,” explained Spike, with some satisfaction. “An it was entertainin’, watchin’ your blood pressure rise. Fish in a barrel, gettin’ you to boilin’ point.”

“Even now, I’m, I’m at a loss to know why I didn’t throw you out, preferably at noon.”

“Yeah. You wanted to hurt me, more than once.”

“About once an hour.”

“Yeah.”

There was a silence. Then Spike got up, and went to the dark window. “I owe you for it. For what you did. For what you didn’t do.”

“Not at all,” said Giles politely. “It was a long time ago, and I, well, I, I had my own reasons for doing it.”

“Look, I’m… this isn’t easy, Rupert, yeah? You’ve done some stuff - you can’t claim never to have done anythin’ you shouldn’t.”

Giles winced. “No.”

“But this one time, you could have hurt me. You could have put me out to fry. You could have given me to the…” he grinned maliciously. “To the ruperts. The military twits. Theoretically, you could. Actually, Rupert? I don’t think so. It’s not in you.”

“You think I couldn’t have killed a vampire?” Giles laughed aloud, a cracked sound that degraded into a cough; Spike handed him his tumbler of tepid water and took it back as the spasms subsided.

“I think that once you’d let me into your house, you couldn’t. If I’d been threatening your Slayer, you would. You could. But I was toothless, an’ you knew it, and we’ll not repeat any of the other words the children used about me, right? It’s not in you to hurt a harmless thing. A defenceless thing.”

Giles looked away. “Oh, it is.”

Spike shook his head. “I know about that, an’ that’s different. Gods and gateways and keys an’ all that, they’re not ever defenceless. I was. An’ I owe you for it.” He hesitated. “I said I’d not come here like Peaches but… I pay my debts.”

“You lying git,” said Giles, startled. “In that case, you owe me several hundred pounds in single malt and Weetabix, and I had to have the plumber out on account of the state you left the bathroom in.”

Spike ignored him. “I’ve come to pay, if you want payin’.” He hesitated again. “I’ve come to pay, if you’ll let me pay. I can give you… I can make it easy for you.”

Giles went very still.

“We can cut most of the crap. I’m not offerin’ to bring you over. You’d come wi’ the body you’ve got now, an’ you wouldn’t last five minutes, even if you agreed to it, an’ don’t put on that face, because I know you wouldn’t agree. You know what I _am_ offerin’, Watcher. I’m offerin’ it because… because you could have hurt me, an’ you didn’t; you could have killed me, an’ you didn’t. Because we got to be… we got so we could be comfortable together, we could talk about things that mattered, and I thought - I _think_ \- we understand each other.”

He let it be, for a full minute, letting Rupert absorb it. Inspect it.  “I’ve been here all day, an’ I’ve been watchin’ the rest of them, the Slayer an’ Red an’ all, most of a week, Rupert. Listenin’ to them talk. You’ve said yer goodbyes. Now you’re just hangin’ about on the platform, an’ yer train’s overdue. There’s nothin’ keepin’ you breathin’ except those tubes; you’re less alive than I am. You were lyin’ when you told that little nurse that you weren’t in pain. Why would you lie to her?”

Giles shifted uneasily. “I can’t talk to people when they give me the painkillers. They make me stupid.”

Spike’s eyebrows rose. “So the pain was on my account? I think I’m honoured. How bad is it?”

For a moment there was nothing to hear but laboured breathing. “Bad.”

“Bad enough for you to trust me?”

Another long silence. “Yes.”

“You want me to come back tomorrow, so you can see them all? Or I can keep comin’ every night until you tell me you’re ready. Doesn’t have to be now.” He expected to be sent away, but Giles was shaking his head.

“I have, as you pointed out, said my goodbyes. I can… if the pain gets much worse, I’m going to lose any… I don’t know if I have the courage to go but I sure as hell don’t have the courage to stay.” His mouth worked and the thin hands twisted the sheet. Spike turned businesslike.

“Any of these tubes an’ things got alarms on them? It’ll be easier for both of us without an audience of angry nurses.”

“I made them take the alarms off a week ago. I couldn’t get five minutes peace without something beeping in my ear. Spike, I don’t want… the nurses here have been good to me. I don’t want anybody in any trouble.”

“I’ll not drain you. Won’t need to, Rupert: the state you’re in, half a pint’ll do it.” He tipped his head. “I was thinkin’, maybe better not to tell the children?”

Giles gave a shaky smile. “No.”

“You quite sure you want it?”

There was a faint snap of the old Watcher. “Do you want me to beg? I wouldn’t have said I did if I didn’t.” Then, a plea, “Now?”

Spike nodded, and Giles fumbled weakly at the collar of his pyjamas. Spike’s hand stopped him. “No need for that; it would show an’ even the Slayer, who couldn’t spot a snowman in a coalhole, would see it.” He began to roll up Giles’ sleeve, almost tenderly. “See, here on your elbow? You’ve already got a load of marks from whatever they’ve done to you. They’ll not notice one more set. Now you lie back, an’ I’ll see you right, Rupert. Won’t hurt a bit, I promise.” He dipped his head, nuzzling at the tender flesh on the inside of Giles’ elbow, feeling for the vein. The skin was chilled; Rupert was almost colder than Spike himself. This wouldn’t take much. He licked softly and Giles shuddered. “Yeah, it’s good, innit? Relax. Let me take care of you.” Rupert knew how it worked: there was an anaesthetic in vampire saliva, and a strong aphrodisiac. The more the Watcher relaxed and accepted it, the quicker it would act. He kept one eye squinted towards the bony fingers; when they began to open, he went game face and let his fangs slide into the skin.

Afterwards, he hung for a moment over the tiny basin in the corner wondering if he was going to hurl: Rupert’s blood had been so thick with toxins that he’d struggled to swallow even the tiny amount that slowed the faltering heartbeat to a standstill. He rinsed his mouth, making sure that all traces of blood were swept away from the porcelain. Then he turned back to the bed, and thumbed the eyelids down, and retreated to the corner, drawing shadow after him. Alarms or no alarms, he would be surprised if there wasn’t a nurse here within ten minutes: they had instincts. He would wait, just to make sure nobody did anything stupid with the electrical kit that hung on the opposite wall, like trying to resuscitate a dead man who didn’t want it. It was disgraceful how much dust there was in this hospital; it was making his eyes water something shocking. Either that or vampires could, in the absence of all good sense, suffer from allergies.

Because it wasn’t, after all, as if William the Bloody would weep for a dead Watcher.


	3. Xander 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Spike being annoying again, and funerals.

It wasn’t hard to find the right crypt: there was only one with a trail of bootmarks and cigarette stubs leading to it. He didn’t quite know how to announce himself: there was no door he could knock, just a wrought iron lattice sitting ajar. It squealed when he set a hand to it. Well, worked like a doorbell, he thought.

“Hello? Spike?”

His eyes adjusted to the candlelight inside and he saw the vampire, stretched out on a camp bed, smoking and nursing a beer bottle, which he waved negligently at Xander.

“Come in, Watcher.”

He stepped cautiously inside.

“The tweed not fittin’ you right, then?”

He frowned, not understanding; Spike sat up, and lit a lamp from the nearest candle. “You looked over yer shoulder when I said ‘Watcher’. Looking for Rupert?”

He winced. “Yeah. We’re all doing it.”

Spike glanced away. “Me an’ all. Park yer bum, Watcher, an’ tell me why you’re here.”

“I… could you not call me that?”

“Why not? It’s true, innit?”

His mouth trembled. “No, it’s… well, yes, but… I, I, I…”

“See, you’ve got the hang of the talk already,” mocked Spike, but somehow there didn’t seem to be any malice in it, and Xander couldn’t help but smile.

“I came to tell you about… the funeral’s going to be at noon on Thursday in the chapel at the crematorium, so I suppose there’s no point in… I mean...”

“None at all,” said Spike flatly. “Holy places an’ daylight.”

Xander half shrugged. He still wasn’t really sure why he was here, except that it had seemed the right thing to do. “Thursday night we’re having a wake.”

“Why, who else is dyin’?”

He was completely thrown. “Huh?”

“If it’s for Rupert, that’s not a wake. You have a wake _before_ the funeral, Harris, not after it. You lot, you held yer wake in the hospital. If the Watcher wasn’t dead then, he was as near as made no odds.”

_“Huh?”_

Spike, who didn’t need to breathe, sighed ostentatiously. “A wake, Harris, isn’t a gatherin’ after a funeral. It’s the bit between the death an’ the funeral when people sit up wi’ the body. Like a lyin’ in state. An’ before you ask, it’s nothin’ to do wi’ the likes o’ me an’ makin’ sure he’s really dead. Time was, people would sit up around the body, an’ pray, an’ tell stories about the dear departed, and do their grieving all together. Don’t do that any more, at least not here. You’re havin’ a get-together Thursday, but it’s not a wake. The Watcher would be ashamed of you: words _mean_ things, an’ you people just use ’em like they’re nothin’.”

Xander stared at him. “How do you know this stuff?”

“How do you not? Were you not listening when the Watcher told you things?”

The sheer truth of that hit hard. “Not as often as I should have been,” he choked. He hadn’t been listening, and now he would never have another chance to listen, and all the things Giles had told him, or would have told him, or _could_ have told him, all the things he wanted to say to Giles… It all rose up, swamping him, and suddenly he was losing control again - _again_ \- and bolting for the exit. Spike did that vampire-speed trick and stopped him, an arm across the doorway.

“Fer pity’s sake, Harris… Oh, sit _down_ , will you? Here.” He flicked the top off a second beer bottle and pushed it at Xander, who accepted it awkwardly. “That’s better. Now, you’re havin’ a bit of a do for Rupert on Thursday. Yes?”

He swigged down a mouthful of beer. It felt odd, drinking with a vampire, but hell, his whole life felt odd. “Dawn’s making cookies. Thousands of cookies. Faith’s planning the biggest ever pizza order. Buffy’s… Buffy’s cleaning house. She’s… and Willow… Yes. We’re having a, O.K., not a wake if you say so but people are coming. I’m, there’s a bottle of Giles’ Scotch in the bottom drawer of his desk, and I’m intending to see how much of it I have to drink before I like it. Or maybe how much it takes before I can pronounce the name.” He chugged the beer again. “If you would like to come, you’re invited.”

“Good lord,” said Spike softly, and Xander shook at the familiar phrase in the English accent - even the wrong English accent. Spike, when he glanced at him, looked abstracted and surprised at the same time. “Yeah, I’ll come.”

Xander leaned his head back against the wall and shut his eyes. “God, it’s good to be out of the house. It… Spike, it’s like the whole house is full of Giles. Last night I heard the stairs creak and I thought, that’s Giles going up to bed. Somebody made a pot of tea this morning; no idea why, nobody ever drank it except Giles. It sat there for two hours, getting cold, because none of us could bear to throw it out. It’s like he’s still in that stupid room he called his library, and if I can get in there quick enough I’ll catch him at the bookcase. He’s _there_ , and I know he isn’t, except that he _is_ , and I want him to be there, to go on being there, and I know he won’t. I know it’s just grief and imagination and soon we’ll stop expecting him to come into the room, and actually,” and he was crying again, crying in front of Spike, which was so totally not of the good but he couldn’t help it, and he didn’t _care_ because if Spike didn’t know how much Xander loved Giles, then Spike was much stupider than Xander thought, “the only thing worse than thinking he’s there is knowing that he’s not.”

Spike sniffed thoughtfully and his own beer bottle clinked as he put it down. “Dunno about that. My mother used to say - before we did the whole vampire thing, ‘cause after that she didn’t say anythin’ useful - that no dead person was gone from anywhere until the people who remembered them were gone too. So the Watcher will stay while you stay, unless you do somethin’ crap like forgettin’ him. He’ll be in England until that Wyndham-Pryce plonker forgets him. He’ll…” He cut himself off, and Xander looked up, surprised, to see the vampire frowning in what appeared to be deep thought, or possibly embarrassment.

They sat for some time, not talking, just drinking beer, and Xander was a little surprised by the comfort of it. Eventually, he stirred. “Look, I’ve gotta go. There are more people I need to tell.” He got up and went to the doorway, not quite sure what else to say, or even if there _was_ anything more to say. “Thanks for the beer.”

Spike nodded abruptly and Xander turned away. The vampire’s voice stopped him.

“Harris?”

He looked back; Spike was frowning again, but now it almost looked like irritation.

“Cheers for the invite.”

Not a graceful expression of thanks, but he was so surprised to get one at all that he could think of no response.

Thursday was easily as bad as he had expected it to be. He seemed to be the only person capable of organising anything: he had remembered flowers, and to make sure that there were enough seats in enough cars to get them all to and from the crematorium. He had put a notice in the local newspaper, and he’d bitten the bullet and called Wesley to ask if there should be some announcement in England and if the Council would do it. Faced with Wesley’s embarrassed hesitation, he’d asked for the names of English newspapers and gone online with a credit card to arrange it himself. He could see that there was a week of work ahead of him, going through Giles’ private papers and writing to all the people who ought to be told, although a middle aged woman had already called him, identified herself as Giles’ lawyer, and run through the basics of Giles’ will with him.

He’d met with the man from the chapel of rest, and had refused almost all of what he was assured were ‘the usual provisions’. Frankly, he wasn’t certain why they were going to the little chapel at all. He’d found, among the things they had retrieved from the hospital, some notes in a horribly shaky version of Giles’ handwriting, specifying that his funeral was to be entirely non-religious. No hymns. No prayers. Xander had panicked: he had no idea what to put in their place until Oz, of all people, had walked in.

“Xan.”

“Oz? Where did you come from?”

Oz shrugged. “Alaska. News made it up there, I thought I should be here.”

Xander wondered how on earth the knowledge of one dead Englishman had made it to Alaska, but as usual with Oz, it didn’t seem to matter. Oz dropped into a chair and twisted his head to see what Xander was doing. The list of ‘the usual provisions’ lay between them, mostly made up of red lines through things that Giles had specifically vetoed, or things that Xander had vetoed on his behalf. He answered the question Oz hadn’t asked. “I’m planning the funeral. The girls won’t, or can’t, and I don’t know how to do it. Giles said no hymns and nothing from the Bible.”

Oz looked thoughtful. “Want me to make a music tape? Are Giles’ albums still here?”

Duh: once Oz had mentioned them, it was obvious. “Got any ideas for words?”

Oz considered. “Don’t remember much from English class, but isn’t there something that starts ‘Death shall have no dominion’? Or that one about ‘some corner of a foreign field that is forever England’? Might be too sentimental for Giles, but it’s about soldiers, isn’t it? Bound to be something in Shakespeare, if we can find it, or… Hang on, Xander.” He stared into space for a moment and then smiled. “Yeah. I know. ‘I am the captain of my soul’. Give me a minute and I’ll have the name of it. _Invictus_ , that was it.” He looked at Xander. “It means ‘unconquered’.”

Yeah, that was right for Giles. 

He’d been so busy that when people started to arrive at the house on Thursday night, he was almost surprised; he was also, he found, so tired that he could hardly bring himself to talk to them. He kept retreating until there was nowhere else to go but Giles’ library.

“Harris?”

Spike, wrapped in his leather duster, was holding two glasses. “Where’s this bottle of Scotch, then?” 

He opened the door to the library. “What do you put in Scotch?”

“Water. Ice if you must. Nothin’ else.” He read the label, and twisted the top off the bottle. “I will say, Rupert knew his whisky.” He looked around the room, and pulled Giles’ chair away from the desk; Xander moved the spare seat to join him. “See what you mean about him still bein’ here.” He tipped his glass towards Xander who copied him awkwardly. “G’bye, Watcher. We’re makin’ sure nothin’ bad happens to yer Laphroaig.”

The first taste made Xander cough and blink; by the fourth glass, he was… not _liking_ it exactly, but he wasn’t struggling. People had drifted in and out, some of them stopping to talk. Spike, oddly, seemed to have very little to say, although he did rouse himself eventually.

“This yer room now?”

He looked owlishly into his glass. “Yes. None of the others… everybody else already has their own space. The only one who might have taken it is Willow. He left all his books to her. All the weapons to Buffy. His personal stuff to me. I thought Willow might come and research down here, but she won’t, at least not yet. She takes a book and goes upstairs with it. Doesn’t want to work here.”

Spike wrinkled his nose. “Early days still. What you said, about feelin’ him here, mebbe it’s too strong for Red yet. Harris, don’t make the room into a shrine. You want to keep it so that you can feel Rupert, that’s one thing, but it’s yer room now, not his. Get some of yer own things in here.” He glanced around. “Although where you’re going to put them…”

Xander snorted in guilty amusement. “I know. We called it the library, like it was stacks and a rare books cage and an issuing desk, instead of a desk and four bookcases and two chairs and everything else piled up wherever it fits.” He sighed and let his eyes travel over the contents of the room. “I’ve given some things away. People want…” The only word that came to him was ‘souvenirs’ and that was wrong…

“Mementos?” suggested Spike, and he nodded.

“Oz is taking his LPs when he goes back to Alaska, and his guitar. There’s nobody else here could play it.” He drank some more Scotch. “I’ve got to clear the stuff from his bedroom, soon. Send his clothes to G-g-goodwill. If anybody wants that much tweed.” He was _not_ going to cry any more.

Spike looked absently off into space. “Yeah. About that.”

“Huh?”

“An’ mementos.”   

He waited, but Spike seemed… _embarrassed?_ He made the leap.

“There’s something you want?”

 _Definitely_ embarrassed. “Yeah.”

“What?”

“His jacket.”

He pictured Spike in tweed. “Randy Giles putting in another appearance?” He couldn’t help it: he giggled.

“Fuck off, Harris.” There was no edge in it. “His leather jacket.”

He stared. “Giles doesn’t - _didn’t_ \- have a leather jacket.”

“Shows what you know. It’s in the plastic cover wi’ his penguin suit.”

“His tuxedo? Are you sure?”

Spike rolled his eyes, but he didn’t answer. Xander got to his feet; the room rolled slightly, but he caught his balance on the edge of the desk. “Let’s look.”

It was true: inside the protective cover was Giles’ tuxedo and a leather jacket with heavy zippers. Xander pulled it out. “How did you know it was here?”

“Saw it when I was… when he stopped makin’ me live in his bath.”

He stared at it. It didn’t fit with the Giles he knew, but… “Is this Ripper’s?”

“Think so, yeah.”

“And you want it?”

“Look, Harris, if it’s that big a deal for you, then no, I don’t.”

He did, though: Xander could tell. “Take it.”

Spike put out a hand, and then drew it back. “Don’t you want to check with Red an’ the Slayer?”

He _so_ didn’t. “Willow’s crying every time I give anything away and Buffy’s just dying to fight with somebody. They’d stop you having it, without any good reason. I don’t think they know it was there; they won’t miss it. I told you: he left his personal stuff to me, so it’s mine to give. Take it.” Discretion overcame valour. “Just don’t tell them.”

Spike jerked his head, but he took the jacket, almost… almost reverently. Xander looked around the room. He had thought that Giles’ bedroom, his personal space, would be harder to bear than the library, but… he supposed he had no image in his head of Giles in here.

“Harris…” Spike looked slightly shifty again. “He used to keep a shoe box under his bed. If it’s still there…”

Xander looked. It was, and he reached for it. Spike spoke hurriedly. “Don’t… I wouldn’t look if I…”

He opened it.

He closed it, his ears burning.

“Might want to get rid of that before it occurs to Red or the Slayer to come in here. I can just see the Slayer clutchin’ her pearls at the discovery that her Watcher was a man.”

“Yeah. Yeah.” He looked blankly at the box, and then even more blankly around the room. “I can’t get it out now: the whole house is heaving with people. Somebody would ask.”

“Stick it under yer own bed until tomorrow.”

It was a good enough idea, but it felt real odd. Spike shepherded him back to the library and with some relief they finished the whisky. The noise elsewhere in the house was dying down; Spike glanced out of the window. “Long past Cinderella time; I’ve got to go.” He picked up his duster, and looked at it for a moment; then he shoved it towards Xander. “Put that in wi’ the stuff you’re takin’ to the charity shop.” He shrugged into Giles’ jacket, which was too big for him, and Xander gaped at him. “Oh, here, give me the fags out of the pocket.”

“You’re leaving your _coat?_ ”

He got a hard glare for that. “Obviously.” It sounded so like Giles that he laughed and thumped Spike between the shoulders; the odd thing was that Spike let him.

He thought about that, later.


	4. Xander 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Spike being peculiar. Buffy being annoying. Quotations from Byron.

After that, they began to… well, things went on. Patrols happened, research happened, and although Willow still had a tendency to say “I’ll just ask…oh,” and look miserable, and he still felt when he sat at the desk that Giles was likely to come in at any moment and ask him to move, things did, nevertheless, go on.

He didn’t know quite what to make of it when Spike turned up again, banging on the back door and obviously in a temper. For a moment he thought about not opening it, but Spike yelled _“Watcher!”_ and once again he had that split second of denial before he realised that yeah, it was him. He flung the door open, careful to keep inside: he’d not known after the - he didn’t care what Spike said, he was calling it a wake - after the wake, quite how he felt about Spike, about whether or not they were friends. Now, he thought that they probably weren’t. Allies, maybe, but not friends, and an angry vampire was always better outside the house than in. Behind him, he could feel Willow priming the magic, and the feet on the stairs were Buffy’s although he wasn’t sure how he knew.

He opened his mouth to ask what Spike wanted, but the vampire was yelling before he could get a word out.

“Do you kids know _nothing?_ Have you learned _nothing_ from… from Rupert? Watcher, there are three breaches in the defences of this house. Three. I could have got in and killed you all in yer beds.”

His mouth dropped open. Whatever he had expected, it wasn’t to be yelled at by Spike for carelessness. Spike looked past him.

“Here, Red. Come outside. This is a soddin’ disgrace. I’m… Rupert would be ashamed of you all.”

Willow cast an uncomprehending glance at Xander, but she went; he wondered if he should stop her, but Buffy shouldered past him to follow, and then, of course, he had to go too. Wandering out into the dark following a vampire? He thought he knew what Giles would have made of _that._

“There, there an’ another one on the top floor. Never mind the soddin’ vampires, any self-respectin’ _burglar_ could get in through there. What the hell were you _thinkin’?_ ”

And oddly, although he didn’t think so until much later, they all just stood there and _took_ it, trailing back into the kitchen behind him when he had finished yelling, and settling shame-faced around the table. At that point, he tried to recover enough dignity for at least one of them.

“Did you come for something special or just to make us feel bad?”

He shrivelled under Spike’s glare the way he used to shrivel when Giles had made it plain that Xander had said something particularly dumb.

“I came to tell you I was leavin’, only now I’m scared to go because you don’t, none of you, seem to have enough wit to come in out of the _rain_ without somebody yankin’ on your leashes.”

He flinched; he knew it was true. They had taken their eyes off the ball, all of them, and he at least was doing it again, because it was Buffy who heard what Spike had actually said.

“Leaving? Going where?”

The vampire looked at her for quite a long time. “I’m goin’ back to England,” he said, eventually. “I’m done here.”

They all talked at once for a minute; Xander thought that they were all feeling the same thing: a mixture of relief that Spike would be out of everybody’s hair and they wouldn’t need to worry about where he was and what he was doing - because Xander had pinned it down: Spike wasn’t reliably either on their side or on the other side. Spike, at bottom, was on Spike’s side - and dismay because Spike leaving would mean that everything was different again, and they weren’t over the last big change yet. The vampire interrupted them.

“I’m goin’. I came to see if you wanted me to take…” and he looked around, and spotted the urn on the shelf; Xander had the oddest feeling that Spike had known, before he came into the house, that it was there. “That. The Watcher’s ashes.”

There was a second’s silence and Buffy sprang to her feet, overturning her chair, reaching for Spike, whose own chair tilted and tipped as he ducked away.

_“What do you want him for?_ _Have you got some ritual…? You can’t have him!”_

Spike came to rest against the sink; Willow put a hand out to Buffy.

“Buffy… no. He can’t. That’s why… that’s why Giles was cremated. Don’t you remember, we talked about it years ago - about how fire cleanses, Buffy. What’s in there, nothing evil can use it for anything. It’s not like blood or, or bone. You can’t do a spell with ash. Well, you can, you can use it for some protections, but not a bad spell, and not… You just can’t.”

For the first time, her eyes turned to him for confirmation and to his surprise he was able to give it. “It’s just ash. It can’t be used to hurt anybody.”

She subsided, her eyes still angry. Willow turned back to Spike. “What… Why?”

Spike, cautiously, set his chair upright again and straddled it. “What are you plannin’ on doin’ with that?”

They exchanged glances. “We hadn’t talked about it,” he admitted. He, at least, had been ignoring the whole thing.

“You scatterin’ his ashes or keepin’ them, or what?”

They just looked blank. Spike sighed. “Look,” he said, quite gently, “if you’re keepin’ them… that’s one thing. People do that.”

It felt wrong, somehow, uncomfortable, and Xander shivered, remembering what Spike had said about allowing Giles’ library to turn into a shrine. Buffy was still quivering with some strong emotion, but Willow nodded. “We ought to scatter them. Bury them, maybe.”

“Where?” asked Spike.

“Here,” said Buffy crossly. “In the garden.”

“An’ when you leave? Because you _will_ leave. This year, next year, some time… Slayer, there will be another Hellmouth. An’ another an’ another an’ another. You’ll leave an’ he won’t. You’ll leave him behind.” Xander, somehow, heard the unspoken word. _Again._ “You O.K. with that?”

“Sunnydale,” said Willow, with the faintest hint of a question in her voice. “We could take them to Sunnydale.”

“To a pit on a Hellmouth where his girlfriend had her neck snapped by the vampire who tortured him. Yeah, that sounds good.”

Buffy was calming down, but she was still obstinate. “It’s where he worked. Where he met me, and O.K., that sounds like I think it’s all about me, but hey, the slayage? Actually, it _is_ all about me.”

“You think Rupert was happy there?”

“Yes! Yes, I do! Most of the time!” It wasn’t even just Spike looking at her pityingly: Xander and Willow did too. “Well, some of the time. Look, yeah, I get that he would have preferred an English Slayer. I know that. I would have preferred an American Watcher. I know that we didn’t always… We made it work. It wasn’t always easy for me either, you know? Stuffy English guy who didn’t understand anything about us? But we _made_ it work, and he didn’t want to be anywhere else.”

No, really, he couldn’t let that pass. “Until he did. Until he thought that you - that _we_ were using him. Then he went.”

“He came back. When we needed him, he came back. He should be here.”

Xander frowned. He… kinda felt like that himself, but… “Buff… maybe it’s time we let him go home? Because this wasn’t home to Giles. It wasn’t, not ever. He stayed because of us, because of the work at first and later because of _us_ , you and me and Will, and Faith and Dawn, but any time anybody asked him where he was from, he said ‘England’. He wanted to be where we were, but…”

Willow was nodding. “But it wasn’t home.”

He could tell that even Buffy knew it was a rearguard action. “Yeah, it totally _was_. Home was where we were. He was the one who decided where we were going next. He was the one who identified the next Hellmouth and…”

“Told you where the next job was,” said Spike softly. “Yeah, you’re right, Slayer. He wanted to be where you were. But you’re not goin’ to go on bein’ here. So if you want him to stay with you an’ it’s not enough to keep him in your hearts,” and that was _totally_ not the sort of thing Spike would normally say, that was a Giles comment if Xander had ever heard one, except that Spike had said the thing about Giles not being gone as long as there was a Scooby to remember him, and he’d said that was his mother’s thing, “then you keep that box. You think it’s Rupert in there?”

Willow was looking horrified and shaking her head violently. Buffy looked away. Xander was suddenly impatient. “What are you suggesting, then?”

“England,” said Spike. “There’s a graveyard inside the Watchers’ estate. I can’t go there, but Pryce could. If the Council will give him house room, all well an’ good. If they won’t… Rupert suborned Pryce enough that I reckon he’d just fix it anyway. If he didn’t… I can get into London graveyards. Crypts. I’ll even get you a gravestone if you want. If you don’t like that idea, he could go in the Thames, or in the sea.”

They were all silent. Eventually Buffy said in a small voice, “I don’t want him to go.”

Xander was thinking. “That thing Oz found for you to read, Buffy?” He himself had read _Invictus_ at the funeral; he didn’t know how he had got to the end of it without breaking down, but he had, and Oz had given Buffy something by Byron.

“‘For the sword outwears its sheath,   
And the soul wears out the breast’

quoted Willow, softly. “‘And love itself have rest’. She looked at Spike. “Can you take him? If we call Wesley and arrange… something?”

Spike nodded. “Soon as I can lay hand on a tea chest an’ find a reliable carrier.”

Buffy was outraged again. “A _tea chest?_ A _carrier?_ Giles isn’t going home _freight class_ , Spike. We can… there must be… a normal service…”

Spike shrugged. “If you want. If you trust FedEx or UPS wi’ your Watcher, you send him that way. If you think they’ll treat him,” and he sneered, “ _respectfully_ , then you can do that. I’ll get meself home in a tea chest, same as usual. You do what you want. All the same to me. I thought I might do you a favour, but if you don’t want it, I’ll go.”

Buffy frowned, but Xander could see she was going to back down; for some reason he didn’t - quite - believe in Spike’s indifference. Spike wanted to do this. Buffy’s eyes narrowed, as she took in what she’d been looking at for half an hour. “Where’s your duster?”

Spike looked shifty, and Xander was glad that Buffy wasn’t looking at _him_ , because he had no doubt he did too. “Fancied a change.”

Fortunately Willow caused a distraction. “Actually, guys, I think we can get around this. Yeah, let Spike take Giles home. We’ll talk to Wesley. But we can do it decently: Spike doesn’t need to go in a tea chest. We’ve got the paperwork that allows a big box to go internationally without people interfering with it.”

They all - Spike included - stared at her. She grinned for the first time since the funeral, as she twisted a solution out of the problem. “We’ve got a death certificate.”


	5. Joseph Quinn/Wesley Wyndham-Pryce

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> International travel, practising Catholicism, and the Council being unreasonable. This is breaking news? I don’t think so. Wesley being sneaky.

Joseph Quinn, who worked in Heathrow airport, was a religious man. He had noticed, ruefully, that he had reached the age at which he went to more funerals than weddings; he regretted the loss of what he saw as some of the rituals of farewell. The modern tendency to take the coffin to and from the church on a wheeled bier, an ugly stainless steel thing, he thought of as seriously inferior to the older ritual of having it carried by family and friends. Health and Safety gone mad, he thought.

Still and all, it wasn’t as if that was something that could be done in an airport. The coffin had to come off the plane and have all the paperwork checked and then be taken on for collection; all of that was his job, and there wasn’t any way to do it other than using a mechanical carrier. No point in fretting about it. He couldn’t make it any more attractive, but he could… well, he thought of himself as a decent man and he could see that it was done decently. Respectfully, that was the word. He always made sure that the job was complete, even if it meant that he had to stay past clocking-off time; he never allowed himself to be rushed. This was somebody’s loved one and since they couldn’t be there to take care of things, he would do it, and he would do it right. In the fullness of time, somebody would do it for him; when he went, his body was going back to Roscommon, and right now, he was treating other people the way he hoped that somebody would treat him.

It was his habit, when he had to process - he hated that word - a coffin, to say the Rosary while he did it. Not exactly _for_ the person in the box: he didn’t know who was Catholic and who wasn’t, whose family would be comforted by the prayers of a stranger and who would find it an impertinence. No, it was more for himself. It kept his mind on what he was doing, stopped him wool-gathering. He would offer an Intention for anyone mourning, and ask for help for them, and for the people like Joseph himself who might be the practical source of that help. He glanced through the paperwork: Rupert E Giles, coming home from the USA, being sent on to an address he didn’t recognise - not one of the funeral directors he’d dealt with before - into the care of a Mr W Wyndham-Pryce. A neat, plain coffin; there was a plate on the top with the name and dates, but nothing else.

He worked the coffin onto the carrier, and set off through the corridors. Steady as you go, Joseph, no hurry. There were more sets of fire doors along the way than was altogether convenient, but he didn’t allow himself to get irritated, just concentrated on his prayers. He finished the Joyful Mysteries, and started on the Sorrowful Mysteries, setting his hand on the foot of the coffin to steady it as he negotiated the four sets of doors at the awkward junction with the ninety degree bend.

Something thumped in the coffin.

Only that was ridiculous. There was nothing there to thump. Nothing to vibrate under his palm. He was imagining things.

He moved on, but his attention was wandering, and he knew it. He forced it back to his prayer. When he had been a boy, Father Gregory had been very definite that you could pray while you did something else physical, but that it was wrong to let your mind wander.

Thump.

Nonsense. It was nonsense, but he set his hand cautiously on the very top of the coffin, above where the heart would be on the… the person inside. Not that he would be able to feel anything from that, but…

Thump.

Oooooooooooookay. So he had heard of… of there being coffins containing things they shouldn’t. He’d never encountered one, but all airport staff had regular training on the subjects of drug-running and people-trafficking. Illegal immigration, that sort of thing. If he thought there was anything untoward, he had to call security and they would look into it.

_No, bad idea. You want to have a look first. Might be making a complete fool of yerself, mate. Get a screwdriver, take the lid off, have a look. Probably imaginin’ things, aren’t you? Find somewhere private, take a gander. Then, if there’s nothin’, you haven’t got a reputation as the guy who thought he had a vampire comin’ through the airport._

Yes, that was a better idea. There was a store-room along here and he had a Swiss Army knife. He could manage the screws with that, not easily, but he had strong wrists from all the baggage handling. He would have a look and then if there was nothing, he hadn’t compromised his promotion prospects. If there was somebody alive inside, well, Joseph was a big man, powerful, and whoever it was had been in a sealed box in an unpressurised hold for ten hours. He reckoned he could take them.

_Sure you can, mate. Uh, this store-room, it hasn’t any windows, has it? What time is it anyway?_

Later on, he was glad he hadn’t made a fuss. There had been talk again about job cuts, redundancies, and he was a married man with children, too old to want to go chasing a new job. He _really_ didn’t need the bosses thinking that he wasn’t reliable, that he went fancying things, specially not the sort of things that might involve having the police in, or Immigration, when there was nothing there to see. Waste of everybody’s time, that would have been. Just as well he’d looked for himself. Nothing untoward in that coffin, and he apologised mentally to Mr Giles for ever thinking that there was. Poor young man, not old enough to die, coming home in jeans and a leather jacket. Odd, though: he didn’t _look_ like Joseph imagined a Rupert would. Not that it was any of his business. He didn’t know what he’d been thinking, imagining that he’d felt something move. His neck itched and there was a sore place under his fingertips when he touched it; he didn’t feel very well. Maybe that was it: maybe he was sickening for something and that was why his imagination had been running away with him. A virus, a fever, perhaps.

Later, he startled his colleagues when he fainted in the break room; the on-site doctor diagnosed anaemia and signed him off work for a week.

* * * * *

Wesley Wyndham-Pryce carefully settled the protections about himself, and started on the last of the screws holding the coffin lid in place. He’d heard movement inside, so as soon the screw flipped out, he stepped back, ready, he hoped, to defend himself. He really _didn’t_ like all this, although he supposed he could see why it was the way Buffy and her friends had organised it.

The lid eased and something inside humped it upwards and then sideways. Spike’s face showed and he looked cautiously around before bringing his gaze back to Wesley.

“We alone?”

Wesley nodded, wondering if he should lie about squads of armed Watchers in the next room. Spike sat up.

“Bloody hell.”

“Good trip?” squeaked Wesley, nervously, British good manners and social conventions overcoming all good sense. Spike stared at him, and he blushed and fidgeted.

“Another time I want a different airline. They dropped me twice before they ever got me onto the bleedin’ plane. Then at this end I had some git _prayin’_ over the coffin. Hurt like hell.”

Wesley cringed. “ _Please_ tell me you didn’t kill him. I don’t have the contacts to cover up that sort of thing.”

Spike looked a little embarrassed. “He opened the box, so I fed, but no, I didn’t kill him. Didn’t turn him, either, if that’s what’s botherin’ you. I just confused him a bit. He won’t remember.”

Wesley stared. “That was very… restrained of you.”

In another man - a live, human man - he might have thought it was a blush. “Didn’t think Rupert would approve of me leavin’ dead bodies lyin’ about in Heathrow Airport, an’ this is his party. Give us a hand outa here, willya?”

He stepped forward awkwardly and extended a hand, half expecting to be pulled in and bitten, but the vampire just levered himself free of the coffin, and then turned back to rummage inside, emerging with a small urn. Wesley eyed it, uncomfortably.

“Ashes,” explained Spike unnecessarily, and then stared: Wesley’s poker face was obviously not as good as he had hoped.

“What’s gone wrong?”

Wesley fidgeted; then it burst out of him. “The sodding Council’s what’s gone wrong, after all Mr Giles did for them!”

Spike backed up to the trestle holding the coffin and perched one hip on the wooden edge. “They’ve said no to the graveyard.”

Wesley made a face. “Not exactly. They said yes; if they’d said no, I would have told Willow not to send the…” and he flapped a hand at the urn. “They said yes and then yesterday, after you had already left, they put conditions on it. They said no to the garden of remembrance.”

Spike frowned. “Which is what?”

Wesley looked away, ashamed of his employers. “It’s the area for Watchers who have had a Slayer. It’s the important place, the bit in the middle. They said he could go in the bit around the outside which is where the support staff go. Not even the rose garden where they put the Watchers who have never seen active service - they’ve allocated him a space out past the car park, where the admin people are. No marker. No stone.”

Spike’s eyes were glowing yellow; Wesley took what he hoped was an unobtrusive step back. “They want you to put _Rupert_ out wi’ the… the typists an’ the cleaners?”

He nodded miserably. Spike’s fangs dropped. “No.”

“Spike, they don’t - obviously - know about you. They know that Willow was sending me the ashes. They’re expecting me to bring them in, tomorrow. If I don’t, they’ll start asking questions, and, and” and his attempt to manage loyalty to both the people who demanded it and the people who deserved it snapped like overstretched elastic. “And it will all hit the fan. I’ve got to give them something.”

The forehead was deeply grooved. “Still no.”

He was going to have to choose and yet, when it came to it, it was no real choice at all. “If I don’t, I’ll be put out to the wilderness too, and then Buffy will have no spy in the encampment at all.”

He thought Spike was surprised. Hell, _Wesley_ was surprised. He repeated, and his voice was steadier and deeper than he feared it might have been, “I have to give them something.”

Spike’s brow was smoothing. “Somethin’. An’ plausible deniability? ‘Them that asks no questions…’”

“‘Isn’t told a lie,’” he confirmed. “Frankly, the less I know, the better pleased I’ll be. I can’t tell what I don’t know but I’m a poor liar.”

Spike considered him. “Where the fuck are we?”

“Kingston upon Thames. I’ve got a hire car. I don’t actually own a car: it’s not worth it in London. We can take it back to Putney; I was planning to go on the Tube from there.”

“Putney,” repeated Spike. “Used to be some decent pubs in Putney. Yeah, take me to Putney, Watcher. An’ you can have the urn to take to your Council. You want to fetch the car? Probably take you a couple of minutes?”

Well, that was clear enough. “Maybe five. I’ll bring it round.” He fled.

He made it a generous five minutes; when he came back, Spike was still leaning on the coffin, but now he was smoking a cigarette, the urn standing between his feet. Wesley scrabbled in his pocket for a knife. “I’ve just got to get the plate off the coffin. We don’t want anybody asking why a man who had been cremated needed a six foot coffin.”

Spike turned, casually, and crashed his free hand down onto the wooden lid, which split and snapped; he lifted the piece with the brass oval and smashed it twice against the trestle. The metal spun away to Wesley’s feet. “Thank you,” he said weakly, picking it up. There was a deep crack in the main body of the coffin and the purple silk lining was torn. He deliberately didn’t look to see if any was missing, say enough to be a makeshift bag. Spike lifted the urn, and hefted it.

“Seal’s broken on this,” he said indifferently; “probably happened when they dropped it. You ought to check the contents, Watcher.”

He accepted it, doubtfully, but Spike waved his cigarette. “Make sure it contains what you expect it to.”

He opened it, cautiously. Inside… “It’s so little, for a man’s life,” he said softly. He tipped the thing, and inspected the contents. “Well, yes, that’s… what I would have expected. We always say ash, but it’s more like light gravel, isn’t it? When my mother died, we scattered her ashes on the Downs. A couple of handfuls of gravel like this, and as much again of fine dust that just blew away…” There was no dust in the jar. “Although I suppose it depends on things like where it’s done, and how. That’s obviously what it ought to be. I’m sure you’re right about the seal breaking in transit; can we reseal it, do you think?” 

Spike produced his cigarette lighter; it was awkward to melt and reform the wax seal, and Wesley had several small burns by the time it was done, but he didn’t think anybody would spot anything untoward.

“Putney?” said Spike hopefully. “Could do wi’ a drink.”

Actually, so could Wesley; they dropped off the car and made, together - and wasn’t that a surprise? - for the nearest bar. What was _not_ a surprise was the vampire dropping into the first free seat and looking up at him. “Guinness. A pint.” Apparently he was buying. Well, to be fair, he had thought about that, about the practical difficulties involved in Spike’s return from America. He went obediently to the bar. They drank the first in silence; with the second they began to talk. Spike seemed to know what had been going on with the Slayer, and curiously, he seemed to approve of Xander Harris as a de facto Watcher. With the third pint, it became possible to have the conversation that wasn’t actually happening at all. Spike started it.

“While I’m here, I might drop into one or two of Rupert’s haunts,” he said, with totally unconvincing nonchalance. “He used to talk about a pub called the _Boy and Dolphin_.”

“I don’t know it,” said Wesley cautiously, “but I expect it would be in the phone book.” He wasn’t sure - yet - where they were going.

“Don’t remember where else he said he went. Do you?”

Ah. “He used to speak with some affection of his Oxford college, although I don’t remember which one he attended. And of course he was a very keen user of the British Museum.”

Spike grunted. Wesley thought quickly. “I, ah, I don’t mean to… it occurred to me that you might find yourself short of funds in your first few days home. I can… I have some spare cash…?”

Spike grinned. “That’s very generous of you, Watcher. Of course I’ll pay you back when I get settled.”

Possibly his face showed his disbelief, because Spike said, “No, really, Watcher, I…” and broke off with a slightly odd expression. Wesley wasn’t going to argue with him. They appeared to be on the same side _now_ but he had no particular faith in it continuing, and it made him uneasy. Still, Spike did appear to be quite good at hearing all the things that Wesley wasn’t saying aloud.

“I went to the cashpoint earlier - I can give you a couple of hundred.” He fumbled with his wallet, and glanced up to smile deprecatingly. “So much rubbish one has to carry about nowadays. And of course for somebody like me, for a Watcher, it’s all library and museum cards. I’m registered with eight specialist archives in London alone, and why they can’t get just one borrower’s card to cover them all… And the credit cards and debit cards and loyalty cards - I’m not even that keen on shopping and I have five loyalty cards in here - and a driving licence, and my flat uses a keycard rather than a metal key now, and so does the Council lobby. Too many of the damn things, really, and it becomes no more convenient than having a keyring and just as easy to lose something and not realise it’s gone. Security in London is a big deal nowadays, I’m afraid.” He set his wallet down on the table and counted out a handful of notes which he passed across to the vampire. “Now, I really must be going - last trains and all that. I’ll just… excuse me one moment, won’t you?” He smiled nervously. “Must just go and, ah, see a man about a dog. Not used to large amounts of beer any more.”

Spike snorted. “Call that a large amount?” He waved a lazy hand. “Go an’ powder yer nose, Watcher. I’ll walk you to the Tube station after: it’s late an’ there’s no sayin’ what’s about in Putney at this time of night. Used to be full of Hooray Henries an’ rugger buggers; I’d hate for you to come to any harm, specially wi’ what you’re carryin’.”

Yes, so would Wesley, but it felt odd to have a vampire offer to see him safely to his train, the way he did with Miss Brindle the archivist. When he came back, he picked up his wallet and the bag in which the little urn reposed, and then frowned at Spike. “Didn’t you used to have,” and then the recollection of _why_ Spike used to have the duster came back to him, but it was too late to stop the question, “a long coat that you wore all the time?”

Spike looked at him, unsmiling. “This one didn’t belong to a dead Slayer.”

“Oh,” he said weakly. “Good.”

When he opened his wallet later to replace his travelcard he was vaguely surprised to see his credit card untouched: the Spike he remembered would certainly have stolen it. Despite himself, he let his fingers trek back through the other cards. London Metropolitan Archives. King’s College, London: Special Collections. Westminster Reference Library. The slot at the very back of his wallet was empty.

The train rattled towards Blackfriars. Wesley smiled.


	6. Spike 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Spike takes a cultural expedition.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have absolutely no idea at all what sort of internal security systems they have at the British Museum so I’ve given them the ones that suit my plot. Extra points for anyone who knows who Spike was talking to, and what came of it, and also to anyone who knows why Spike made the link between the Nimrud bowls, cats and murder.

Spike approved of the fact that entrance to the British Museum was free; he also approved of the fact that on Fridays it remained open until half past eight. That allowed him to walk in freely, rather than having to dodge about in doorways, sprinting from Tottenham Court Road Tube station and hiding under the trees. It was all very well saying that a vampire could freely enter a public building, but it was bloody inconvenient that so many of them closed before nightfall.

He stuffed both hands deep in his pockets, and began to cruise through the galleries, deep in thought, trying to remember what Rupert had said about this place. The Americas? No. The Watcher had been reasonably well informed about the history of the Americas, both north and south, but not, he thought, particularly interested. Asia? He didn’t think so. Egypt? Maybe. Greece and Rome? More likely; he might go and look, but he wasn’t convinced. The Middle East? Yeah, O.K., he would go and have a look at that. Mesopotamia, perhaps. Bloody hell, clay tablets. _Not_ his idea of fun. Assyria, that sounded more like it. Big things, showy. He could almost hear Rupert grumbling about _conspicuous consumption._ If they had come together, he would have whined to see the winged bull and the Lachish reliefs - even he had heard of those - and Rupert would have snarled about the Royal Cemetery at Ur.

He refused to think about how long he had spent inside galleries that he would have sworn didn’t interest him. There was the original of the Asseb board Rupert had owned in Sunnydale; after they had quarrelled for the fourth time over his inability to care about chess, Rupert had taught him to play; Harris had spotted the tetrahedral dice one day and had teased them both mercilessly and tediously about being closet Dungeons and Dragons players. As if. Once you’d seen a real dragon, games about them were… less appealing.

A display of cauldrons, bowls and bits of bowls tickled at his mind, he wasn’t certain why. He didn’t remember Rupert talking about anything like that, but he came back to them several times. The inscriptions were in West Semitic; how did he know that? And for some reason they reminded him of cats, and it annoyed him that he couldn’t remember why. He went back for yet another look: the court of Tiglath-Pileser. Definitely cats and… murder? Why cats? Why murder? He didn’t know. The bowls were…

Good lord, he was going off his trolley. The bowls were _not_ particularly interesting, not by comparison with some of the other things. The other things in the other _more interesting_ galleries. The galleries he was going to look at now, not hanging about any longer with bloody _bowls_.

He turned to the doorway and walked hard into a man coming the other way, opening his mouth to growl and suddenly thinking better of it. He did _not_ want to draw any untoward attention to himself, not tonight.

“Sorry, mate, not lookin’ where I was goin’.”

“No harm done,” the man assured him. “I get distracted myself by the exhibits.”

“Yeah,” Spike agreed. _You’re a tourist, you’re a visitor, behave like one: make conversation._ “I like the big things meself, but every so often there’s a tiny thing that belonged to somebody, an’ it makes it all real, know what I mean?”

The man smiled. “I know exactly. Sometimes when the children come in, the school groups, you’ll see them with some small object, something that perhaps isn’t very rare, but it’s something they _know_ and you can see them absorb that children two thousand years ago were just like them. Some of the exhibits really seem to capture the imagination.”

“I always have to go an’ see the Sutton Hoo stuff,” Spike confirmed, thinking _huh? I’ve never been here before in all my born - or undead - days!_

“Oh, I absolutely agree. That’s on my list of ‘if you see nothing else, see this.’”

“That’d be a good thing to have on the way in,” said Spike, thoughtfully. “For tourists, an’ people like me who can’t spend the whole day.” _An’ you have no idea how true that is, mate, an’ what the seven hells am I talkin’ about?_ “A list of ten must-sees. Change it twice a year. Rotate it wi’ the new exhibitions.”

The man looked interested. “That’s actually a very good idea. What do you think: ten things in one category so that people aren’t trailing all over the building, or ten different things?” He smiled sheepishly. “I work here, you’ve probably gathered.”

Fuck, he was giving this serious consideration. “Could do different sorts - ten kids’ things for the school party. Ten things to do wi’ war, that’d be easy. Ten masks. Or somethin’ that exists in one form or another for thousands of years. Bring em’ forward from the dawn of time to now.” He grinned. “Or just get members of staff to pick their personal favourites. Ten things to explain the human condition from…”

The man was thoughtful. “I don’t think you could do that in ten, the jumps would be too big, but yes, the history of the world in fifty artefacts. That would be a fun list to make, don’t you think?”

“Sounds like a book to me,” observed Spike. “Short chapters, lots of pictures. The sort of thing you sell downstairs. Photo of the thing, bit about it, maybe by some specialist, if you can get a specialist who can talk wi’out fillin’ it up wi’ long words.”

The man’s eyes lit up; he looked like Rupert when Rupert got going on something that really interested him. “Not an academic specialist. You know, I really think you’re onto something. A specialist in whatever… in what the thing is _for_ , not what it is. A fashion designer for the fabrics. A soldier, a military specialist for the weapons.”

“Sculptor for some of the statues,” suggested Spike. “Banker for the coins.”

“I really do like the idea, I think it has real… yes, Rachel?”

A young woman had appeared in the doorway. “Sorry to interrupt, but they’re waiting for you downstairs.”

“All right, I’m coming.” He smiled at Spike. “Sorry: duty calls. Pleasure to talk to you, and I really do like that book idea.”

Spike waved dismissively. “I’ll give it to you fer nothin’. Look fer the book next time I’m in.” Which would be never, because he wasn’t the sort of vampire who would hang about in a museum, except that he hadn’t seen the Sutton Hoo things yet and he likely wouldn’t have time this visit.

He hovered about at closing time; various people did sheepdog sweeps to make sure that everybody was out before locking doors behind them, but for a night creature it wasn’t hard to find a shadowed corner and vanish into it. Once everything went quiet, he waited another hour to make sure that there were no late shift workers, and then uncoiled himself and began to explore. It wasn’t totally dark; most of the main lights had been extinguished, but there were security lamps here and there; the galleries echoed and he was far from certain that he was the only thing alive - alive- _ish_ \- inside. Somehow he felt that if he could listen at the right pitch, he would hear the booming voices of the statues in the Egyptian section. He drifted from room to room, demon eyes finding the infra-red beams of the security cameras, demon speed deceiving them, and found himself back at the bowls. He still couldn’t pin down why mention of Tiglath-Pileser made him think of murders and cats.

Demon instincts told him to shut _up_ about cats and to go… _that_ way. Along here, through this corridor and down the stairs, down and down and here was a locked door and he needed to be on the other side of it. He scrabbled in his pocket for the stolen access card, swiped it and pushed the door open. No lights through here, nothing but the infra-red beams, and racks and racks of white drawers. No idea what he was looking for, or why he was looking for it, except that he wanted somewhere for Rupert and it couldn’t be one of the main galleries because there was nowhere he could leave a handful of dust that wouldn’t be noticed. He hadn’t spent all that time in a coffin with another man’s name on it, carrying the Watcher in a bloody urn, for the Watcher’s ashes to end up inside an industrial vacuum cleaner. Half of them were already being – being _disrespected_ – in a Watchers’ Council graveyard; the rest were going somewhere Rupert would approve of.

 _That way._ Well, as good as any other. He turned left and started to walk. _Stop._ A rack, indistinguishable from the others, except that something, _something_ … He put his fingers lightly to the handle of the drawer and felt a low, dangerous buzz. _Careful._

Yeah, careful. He flicked open his cigarette lighter, and in the inadequate light, read the typed label. _Nimrud bowl, damaged, Layard, Assyria_ and a code of some sort. A bowl? Why would a bowl be dangerous? Cautiously he slid the drawer open and held the cigarette lighter towards it.

It looked like a superannuated Chelsea dinner plate, eight or nine inches across, with a decorated interior and a chased rim, rather badly corroded and bent. As he leaned over, the lighter flame leapt and a spark danced across the bronze surface, dividing into two and Spike dropped the lighter and grabbed at the tiny glints, snuffing them between his fingers. Then he slammed the drawer closed and bent cautiously to feel for his lighter.

“That,” he said conversationally to the velvet darkness, “was a Phoenician fire demon. These daft buggers have got a set of demon raisin’ equipment, an’ they don’t know it. What’s more, if it’s a strong enough demon to materialise its eyes just from a disposable lighter, I don’t want to think what it could do wi’ an open flame somewhere within twenty feet. Now, this is a museum, I hear you say, an’ museums tend not to be so keen on the open flame idea, but that bowl is metal, an’ if they were to lay hand on the missin’ bits, I wouldn’t put it past them to sacrifice one of them to get the specific details of the metal alloy.”

The silence was approving. “And the demon might be able to materialise in the bit an’ jump to the bowl an’ next thing you know, the Great Fire of London would look like a Guy Fawkes bonfire in a suburban garden. So it might be a good idea, I’m thinkin’, to get rid of that demon, or at the very least to lock it in the bowl so it can’t get out. An’ I’m thinkin’ that _that’s_ what we’re doin’ here.  An’ don’t roll yer eyes at me, even if you aren’t really here an’ I’m talkin’ to a dead man in my head.” He backed away from the drawer and leaned against the opposing wall. “ _Think_ , Spike. Water. Fire extinguishers. Fire blankets. Asbestos. They’ve been buildin’ an’ rebuildin’ here for two and a half centuries; want me to crawl about in the roof lookin’ for asbestos? Trouble is, I dunno what it looks like, an’ we don’t have time. What I’ve got is you, Rupert, an’ you’re ash. You’re fire now. Can you bind fire wi’ fire?” He frowned. “You can’t. You can bind any element wi’ at least one of the others an’ if you’re really good, which I’m not, wi’ _any_ of the others but you can’t bind like wi’ like. So it’s not bindin’. It’s somethin’ else. If you can’t stop a demon doin’ what the demon does, you stop it doin’ it to _you._ If you can’t stake the vampire, you stop it gettin’ into yer house. Or you stop it gettin’ out of its own house. You make a barrier. Fire break. _Fire break!_ You stop a fire spreadin’ by makin’ a break where there’s nothin’ will burn, an’ ash doesn’t burn! Spike, you’re brilliant. Rupert, what did I say about rollin’ yer eyes?”

Carefully, he removed a small box from the inside pocket of the jacket. It was a handsome Victorian military tobacco tin, with the name of a regiment in which he had never served; he no longer remembered the face of the young soldier he had bitten. Demon sight was sufficient to let him get the lid off; he wasn’t going to risk the cigarette lighter again. He took off the leather jacket and laid it on the floor, took a deep breath he didn’t need. “Right. Watcher, there should probably be some words for this, but I ain’t got any. This is goodbye, an’, an’ you’re goin’ to do some good here. Ready?”

He slid the drawer open and reached for the bowl; it was hot when he touched it and he spared a thought to wonder how the humans could have missed it. _Dormant until you showed it a spark._ Quickly, and by touch, he tipped the contents of his tin into the bronze bowl. There was a flash and a sudden dancing flame that flickered across the little heap of dust which was moving, pouring like water but against the behaviour of any water Spike had ever seen. It poured _upwards_ , lapping the rim of the bowl and breaking back over the flame, enveloping it, smothering it.

Extinguishing it.

Spike waited, counting slowly in his head. At a hundred, he dared to reach down to the jacket at his feet and extract his lighter, clicking it cautiously at arm’s length and advancing to peer into the drawer. The bowl was… quiet. Cool, when he touched it. Empty, but when he set a tentative finger inside, it felt… friendly. He turned his hand over and drew the tiny flame close. Nothing. No dust, no ash on his hand.

“Reckon we’re done, then,” he said quietly.

Nothing answered him.

A pre-dawn cleaner found herself opening the door she had just locked behind her, and briefly scolded herself for inattention; brain not working so early in the morning, she concluded. She wondered vaguely where the young man in the leather jacket who was currently trotting in the direction of Malet Street had come from: she hadn’t noticed him on her way in. And what he was doing out at this hour? Why, it wasn’t light yet.  As she turned away from the door she saw on the floor a museum access card; she picked it up to return to the office. People were so careless: W Wyndham-Pryce probably didn’t even know he had lost it.

She went about her work in the deserted museum.


	7. Raymond Barrett

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which all is explained.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter warnings: totally unjustified abuse of London bankers. To the best of my knowledge there is no Black Swan pub on Romford Road, Redbridge, London E12.

Raymond Barrett was a banker, and as a banker he was, in his own opinion, entitled to have nice things, and lots of them. His house, in which he spent very little time, was filled with his previous enthusiasms: four different types of skis (he hadn’t used any of them in two years), a selection of televisions and computers and sound systems that he rarely touched, designer clothes that somehow didn’t make him look fashionable. His garage contained two vehicles: an expensive sports car that he drove rarely and dangerously, and an even more expensive Range Rover that he used to drive the half mile to and from the railway station every day. His newest nice thing was a motorcycle, a large growling shiny toy. He had, as usual, spent a lot of money on the accessories for his latest plaything: dark sexy leathers, an expensive helmet, and a series of parking and speeding tickets.

It looked fabulous, and he knew it, leaving it conspicuously in the middle of the pub car park and swaggering inside to meet the same people with whom he spent his working hours. As he approached the doorway he met a man with a ridiculous bleached hairstyle and a leather jacket, twenty-five years out of date, looking like some antediluvian rock-star; Ray-Bar squared his padded shoulders and lengthened his stride a little to get to the door first. He admired his own reflection in the glass; he completely failed to notice that the other man didn’t have one.

He left a little earlier than usual; there was a local rumour that the police were intending to breathalyse every driver leaving the car park after closing time, and he didn’t intend to get caught in that trap. He’d had a bit, he wasn’t denying it, but he could hold his drink. And actually, he’d caught the landlord staring at him a couple of times, and the last two rounds he’d made Mike the junior analyst go to the bar, because no way was he going to get himself in the position of being refused service. Yeah, maybe that last treble had been one too many but…

“Hey, mate?”

He looked around; something pale shimmered in the darkness under the trees between the car park and the beer garden. There was nobody out there tonight: too dark, too cold, and some stupid hen party in the glass conservatory built onto the lounge bar blocking the door to the smoking deck, shrieking with laughter and making obscene suggestions to any man stupid enough to come near them. He took a step in that direction and the pale shape resolved itself into the face and hair of the loser in the leather jacket. Raymond had seen him once or twice during the evening, sitting in a corner, watching the people come and go. The barmaid, Annie? Angie? had been making eyes at him, and he’d spoken to her once or twice, but nothing more. Stupid git. Raymond himself had made a play for Annie, smiled at her and offered to buy her a drink - she had nice tits and he’d made sure she knew that he thought so - and been frozen out by the frigid bitch. He’d thought maybe she was a dyke, but she’d been eyeing up loser boy. Hadn’t got him though, not if he was hanging about in the dark. What was his problem, anyway? Stupid little ponce, probably that was why he’d turned Annie down, but he needn’t think he was going to get any change from Ray-Bar. If the little fairy so much as laid a finger on him, he’d find himself eating his teeth.

“Mate?”

Because Ray-Bar was going home, but he’d just go over and see what the little pansy wanted, because… well, because he would.

“That’s right. A bit closer.”

Not fucking likely, gayboy. He wasn’t going off in the dark with some stupid knob.

“Over here. See? Round the back.”

Yellow eyes. The ponce had yellow eyes. And he was a load uglier than Raymond had thought, all heavy brow and… teeth?

The ground under his arse was wet, and cold, even through his leathers, and the wall at his back smelled of piss and dead beer. He felt weird; his joints hurt and he was too weak to get up and he didn’t know why. He turned his head slowly, and the world came back into focus. It was dark, and something loomed; he stared and it resolved itself into the big green recycling bin. He was behind the pub. Why was he behind the pub? Why was it so dark? The lights over the car park had gone out, and the lights in the pub too; there was a security light glowing over the door and in its feeble glow he could see the blond guy in the leather jacket. He’d looked different before. Now he looked relaxed and… amused?

“Oh, you’re back wi’ us, are you? Gotta tell you, mate, you need to ease up on the drink. Yer liver’s complainin’. I should have been gone from here an hour ago, but,” and he made an odd face, “ _apparently_ I’m not fit to drive yet. An’ that’s on account of your blood bein’ almost undrinkable wi’ a disgustin’ mixture of alcohol and sugar. What the hell were you on, zombies? Slammers?”

He tried to say something, but all that came out of his mouth was a gurgle.

“Now, look, mate, you’re in luck. Time was, I’d have killed you an’ not thought twice about it. You wouldn’t be any great loss, from all I’ve seen, but there’s been some changes made an’ apparently I don’t do that any more. So this is your chance to turn your life around, because I’ve had to - turn my unlife around, I mean - an’ I don’t see why I should be the only one to suffer.”

He gurgled again, and the man sniggered. “Not feelin’ so good? Hangover and blood loss’ll do that to you, although it’s a bit early for the hangover.”

What? Blood loss? He managed to raise a hand. Everything hurt, but nothing hurt enough to be a serious injury, the sort of injury that meant heavy blood loss. He must have been beaten up to feel this weak but it didn’t hurt enough for that either.

“Don’t scratch yer neck. That’s scabbin’ nicely, though I do say it meself. I kept it tidy, because _apparently_ I don’t like inefficiency any more.” The man sniffed. “This is goin’ to take some gettin’ used to, you know.”

Oddly, Ray thought the man wasn’t speaking to him, but there was nobody else there. He made another desperate sound and the man came closer, and then, with horrifying ease, pushed an empty aluminium beer barrel towards him, and sat on it, looking down on him.

“Kind of you to take an interest,” he said cheerfully. “Let me tell you all about it.”

Raymond managed to get a word out. “Ambulance…”

“Nah, no need. But you ain’t goin’ anywhere, an’ apparently neither am I until I’m sober, which will happen to me much quicker than it happens to you on account of the demon inside, so since we’re goin’ to be hangin’ about together for a bit, let me tell you all about it. I do tend to talk a bit when I’m drunk. Well, that an’ kill people, but as I say, apparently that’s off. By the way, me name’s Spike. An’ yours is Raymond, or so it says on the stuff in yer wallet.”

He struggled vainly; his wallet…

“You want to be more careful wi’ yer possessions, you know,” said Spike virtuously. “I’m goin’ to teach you that. I’ll give you back the wallet - look, I’ll put it in yer lap. I’m afraid I’m going to need the cash. An’ I don’t see,” and once again he seemed to be talking to somebody else, “why I can’t keep his credit card. It’s a gold one; I never had a gold one before.” He turned his attention back to Raymond. “This feels completely weird, do you know that? An’ of course, you don’t have the first idea what I’m talkin’ about, do you? I need to go back to… I need to go back to the days of the Roman Republic. That was the bit before the Roman Empire, an’ there was a patrician - I kind of feel I need to start wi’ ‘Are you sittin’ comfortably? Then I’ll begin’ but you won’t have any idea what that’s from, will you? You’re too young.” His head tipped as if he was listening to somebody, and he smiled. “Well, I would expect _you_ to know,” he said affectionately. 

“Anyway, this patrician, his name was Tanicius. Yeah, all right, it probably wasn’t, but the story the way we’ve got it now says his name was Tanicius. Don’t interrupt.”

He hadn’t said anything.

“Tanicius was a Watcher, an’ you won’t know what that is, will you. Well, I’ll tell you, because it’s not like you’re goin’ to remember later. I’m a vampire, see?”

The eyes glowed yellow again; the ridged visage was the face of a horror, and he whimpered in terror.

“Now that, by very definition, means I’m one of the Black Hats. White Hats come in two sizes: there are Slayers, who are bossy bitches who kill people, an’ Watchers, who are boring farts who tell Slayers _how_ to kill people.” He gave a little snigger as if somebody had objected. “Well, they are, most of ‘em. Sometimes you get one who knows how to live a little. Tanicius was a Watcher; we don’t know the name of his Slayer. She doesn’t really come into the story. Eumachia, on the other hand, _does_ come into the story. She was a vampire, and the silly cow fell in love with Tanicius. Happens, occasionally - vampires are romantics at heart. So the heart tends to belong to somebody else, but anyway. Tanicius fell in love wi’ her too, and from the sound of things it wasn’t just that she threw the glamour over him, it was the real deal.

“Now, you can probably imagine, Raymond, that relationships between Watchers an’ vampires don’t tend to go well. In fact, the only relationships I can think of that go _worse_ are relationships between vampires an’ Slayers. They’re always crap, always end up wi’ somebody gettin’ hurt, an’ the catch is that the someone isn’t always either the vampire _or_ the Slayer. But these two, they were in love. Now _apart_ from the fact that Tanicius should have let his Slayer kill Eumachia, an’ if she didn’t, he should have killed her himself, there are issues about livin’ together. Bein’ mostly, that it doesn’t work so well. Humans, mostly diurnal. Vampires, not. Half the stories you people know aren’t true: I can cross runnin’ water perfectly well. Silver hurts me, but it’s got to be very pure, so handling currency ain’t a problem an’ that thing you’ve got on yer wrist… if you paid more than thirty quid fer that, you were had, mate. But daylight is a real problem, an’ while you can do a certain amount claimin’ that yer partner works nights, if she _never_ goes out in the daytime, people do tend to talk. But maybe, if he hadn’t been a Watcher, they could have worked somethin’ out.

“He _was_ a Watcher, though, an’ from all accounts he was a proper pain in the arse.” The man cocked his head again, as if listening. “Or, dependin’ on yer point of view, he was a strong and honest Watcher. Take yer pick. The other thing about vampires that _is_ true is that we go on livin’, more or less until we decide to stop. Yes, all right, or until the Slayer gets us. So we’re not good at the long term relationships with humans because for us, long term is… long. We tend to hang about wi’ humans until we’re bored an’ then we kill them. But once in a while we meet one we think we could stand to be around, an’ then we turn them. You know about turnin’? When we make more vampires? Partly on account of we don’t breed.

“So Eumachia wanted to turn Tanicius, an’ Tanicius didn’t want to be turned, an’ she didn’t force the issue, which is actually most unlike a vampire. We’re a bit like bankers that way - we see somethin’, we want it, we take it, an’ we don’t pay much attention to the folks who object. She offered several times, because he wasn’t gettin’ any younger, an’ bein’ turned when you’re old is another thing that doesn’t end well, usually. If you turn an old an’ sick human, you get an old an’ sick vampire. If grandad was a bit dotty an’ tended to go wanderin’ about in his carpet slippers when he was alive, he’ll do it when he’s undead, an’ he’ll forget the sunlight thing an’ fry. So Eumachia offered, an’ Tanicius said no, an’ she kept on at him but she didn’t just do it, thinkin’ she had a bit of time left. An’ then there was a fight, probably wi’ other vampires, an’ Tanicius got hurt. He got a sword in the belly.”

The man - what had he called himself? Spike? - stopped and searched his pockets, coming up with a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. His eyes glowed yellow in the tiny flame and he drew in the smoke sensuously. “Yeah, yer likin’ that, ain’t you? Never really give it up, nicotine. We’ll try some other fun stuff presently.”

He looked back at Raymond. “Belly wounds are bad news, an’ in those days they were a death sentence, an’ a slow one. Slow an’ painful. Tanicius was dyin’, no doubt about it, an’ no point in turning him any more. He’d have come wi’ his guts hangin’ out, an’ although we don’t die easy, we do feel pain. Eumachia couldn’t bear it, an’ she killed him. The story the way the vampires tell it is that she offed him because he wasn’t any use to her any more. Then she went mad. She didn’t seem to know if she was six ways or Sunday. She cried all the time. She tried to get into a temple an’ freaked out because she couldn’t. She stopped feedin’, an’ while a vampire can live a long time wi’out blood, it’s not easy an’ it’s not comfortable. She kept tryin’ to go out in the day. She started chasin’ Tanicius’s Slayer, an’ you can imagine how well that went over. In the end the Slayer got her, an’ from the sound of things, nobody, White Hats or Black, was sorry.

“Now the Watchers tell it a little differently. They’re agreed that Tanicius was an idiot an’ Eumachia wasn’t much better, but they’re a lot harder on the miscegenation thing. A vampire who takes up with a human, even a Watcher, is a stupid vampire to other vampires. A Watcher who bonks a vampire is likely to get drummed out of the regiment wi’ all his buttons cut off. So I don’t think they were altogether sorry that it didn’t come to anythin’. But their version of the big death scene isn’t the same as ours. We said Eumachia killed Tanicius because he’d stopped bein’ a pretty toy an’ because she was overcome by the blood, gut wounds tendin’ to be messy. The Watchers, havin’ been all anti so far, suddenly come over soppy an’ make it into a big tragedy. Eumachia, havin’ been the villain, is transformed into the tragic heroine who can’t live wi’out her man. Might even have been true. The _Watchers_ say that she offered Tanicius a clean and painless death, out of love fer him, an’ he accepted it in gratitude, an’ that the reason she fell out of her tree afterwards is that she drank his blood an’ took in with it a knowledge of how wicked she was, an’ couldn’t cope wi’ it.”

He waved expressively with the cigarette. “Now the trouble is, Watchers don’t actually _know_ much about vampires. They know fifty-seven bazillion ways of killin’ us, an’ they know about the demon, but they don’t know about _us_. Yeah, O.K., an’ we don’t know about them either. Apart from the same fifty-seven bazillion ways of killin’ _them_. So when I read the Watchers’ version of the story, an’ I tied it to the story _I_ knew, I got a different twist to the plot. I think Eumachia got a soul when she killed the Watcher. You know that a vampire doesn’t have a soul, right? But it’s that we _don’t_ , not that we _can’t_. There have been a few who did.” He sniffed disapprovingly. “Got em’ imposed by other people, an’ the evidence is that it doesn’t end well. But that’s another story. We don’t take souls on _willingly._ Am I borin’ you?”

Scaring him. He didn’t believe in vampires, except that this plainly _was_ one, and mad as a box of frogs as well, unless that was normal for vampires. He wanted to scream and run, but his body wouldn’t oblige him.

“Now souls is difficult. Souls is… Listen, mate, if you’re goin’ to criticise my grammar, you an me are goin’ to fall out, you know that? All right, souls _are_ difficult. A soul is a speck of purity, or somethin’. It requires a pure emotion, comin’ or goin’. Pure happiness can get you a soul, or lose you one. I’ve seen that happen meself. So what I think happened is that when Eumachia offered to top Tanicius, she did it out of pure love, an’ that’s why she got a soul. But there’s more. Souls - there’s loads of ‘em about. You get one, it’s like one of them - one of _those_ \- what did I tell you about correctin’ my grammar? - one of _those_ vendin’ machines. You press the button an’ the next Mars bar drops into the slot. New baby, next available soul. But I think there’s more to it than that. I think Tanicius came into it too. He loved Eumachia, by all accounts, an’ I think there was some pure emotion on his part too. Love? Maybe. Gratitude? Regret? Dunno. But the catch is, he kicked the bottom of the vendin’ machine and the Mars bar didn’t drop, the Twix did. I think Eumachia got a soul an’ the soul she got was his, him bein’ finished wi’ it. An’ she recognised it, an’ then she couldn’t cope wi’ being a vampire wi’ the soul of a Watcher.”

He got up off the beer barrel and stretched luxuriously. “Another ten minutes an’ I’ll be fit to drive, I reckon. Listen, mate, as well as the drink, you want to cut down on the white powder. Your body doesn’t like it, I’m tellin’ you… Now, you’re askin’ me, or if you’re not you should be, what all this has to do wi’ you. Well, I’ll tell you. Not that long ago, there was another White Hat, a chap called Rupert Giles, an’ he was dyin’. An’ I owed him somethin’, so I went to see him, an’ I made him an offer. I offered him an easy death. Now it wasn’t like Eumachia an’ Tanicius, because me an’ the Watcher, we weren’t in love - stop _laughin’_ , you - but we were…” He paused, for a long time; the blood beat slowly in Raymond’s ears. He wondered how he still had enough to beat.

“We were friends,” said Spike, eventually, sombrely. “Friends. An’ because we were friends, I couldn’t bear to see him witherin’ in a hospital bed. I offered him somethin’ better, and I offered it in pure friendship. An’ he accepted it in… I think the same. Well, gratitude, if you like. Don’t care for the word, meself. But he an’ I had worked out what had happened to Eumachia, an’… well, we both wondered if there might be... _consequences_. An’ then, because I used to be William, an’ he used to be Ripper, we took the risk anyway. So…”

He threw his arms theatrically wide. “So here I am, a vampire wi’ a soul, an’ the soul I’ve got belonged to a Watcher.” He let his hands drop. “He’s livin’ inside me, an’ it itches like bloody fuck, but I think we’re goin’ to be O.K. It’s takin’ some gettin’ used to, like I said. I wasn’t sure for a bit that I’d even got him, which I suppose was him gettin’ bedded in an’ findin’ out how to talk to me, but he’s barely shut up for the last week. He’s an interferin’ git, too. He says he’s sorry we’re cleanin’ out yer wallet but I owe a couple of ton to another Watcher an’ he says I’ve got to pay it. I don’t see meself why it’s O.K. to take it from you but it’s not from Wesley, except that you’re a total dick, an’ these days Wesley’s tryin’ not to be. You may have noticed that you ain’t dead. That’s on account of Rupert, too. He says feedin’ is one thing but killin’s another, an’ you an’ that plonker at Heathrow should be grateful for it. The tea drinkin’ is a bit of an issue, because it makes me piss like a horse, an’ it’s as well we got away from America because the children would have noticed sooner or later - later probably, because they’re as thick as shit, all except Red an’ the werewolf, an’ the werewolf is the only one who notices _anythin’_ \- that the Watcher was still givin’ them grief about proper protection. Well, an’ because I knew he didn’t want to be buried there, an’ he couldn’t argue for himself. Oh, an’ apparently I’m to work on ‘please’ an’ ‘thank you’. Tosser.” This was apparently not aimed at Raymond, but it sounded affectionate. “I’ve given him his own way about the coat - that was the first time I began to suspect he was there, that an’ when I started to use his turns of phrase - but he’s not interferin’ wi’ the rest of me wardrobe, not if he knows what’s good fer him.

“Now,” and he stood up and stretched again, “I reckon I’m sober, so we’ll be gettin’ along. We’re… what?” He looked into space like somebody on a long phone call, and then gave an exaggerated sigh and came close enough to search Raymond’s pockets, extracting his mobile. “If you insist. Here, mate, how do you unlock… oh, no, I got it. Rupert says I have to call 999 for you. Hello, ambulance. Please! Ambulance, please. Tosser! No, not you, love, the man here wi’ me. Listen, right, there’s a man at the back of the Black Swan pub on Romford Road… what? Postcode? Do I look like a Yellow Pages? Redbridge. Oh, he says E12. The man on the ground, he’s in among the bins, he’s conscious but he’s not makin’ any sense and he’s not gettin’ up. I dunno if he’s drunk, love. No, I don’t know him. Yeah, I’ll wait until the ambulance arrives. Ta, love.” He poked at the phone, and then slid it back inside Raymond’s leathers. “Actually, mate, that was what we vampires call a lie: we’re not stoppin’.” Something flashed in his hand and Raymond, with no particular surprise, recognised the keys of his motorcycle; the vampire picked up his helmet, and started to put it on.

“It’s not that we need the skid lid, not really, but Rupert says we’re less likely to be noticed if we’ve got one, and I suppose he’s right. He says you can pick up your bike from here tomorrow - call it day after - an’ the keys’ll be under the seat. If you’re very lucky an’ we’ve got enough dosh left, we might even refill the tank. Now, it’s been lovely chattin’ wi’ you, because I needed to tell somebody, an’ it couldn’t be Wesley or the kids, but it’s gawd knows how many years since I hit London on a Friday night, an’ longer since the Watcher did, so Ripper an’ I have some serious hard livin’ to do. We’ll be off. Cheers for the bike, an’ the cash an’ the blood. That polite enough for you, Rupert?”

He closed his eyes; the motorbike barked and thrummed, and he heard the screech of tyres as the man - men - burned some rubber on the short approach to the roundabout. He thought they were arguing again.

Somewhere in the distance there was an ambulance siren. 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is just so that you can check what you have (of course!) already worked out.
> 
> Spike's discussion with the un-named (but obviously very senior) member of staff at the British Museum resulted in both a book and a prize-winning BBC Radio 4 series, which can be downloaded [here](http://www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/). I recommend it; the podcasts are 15 minutes each, and not biased to the UK, or even to Europe. Some episodes are obviously more interesting than others, but the whole thing is fascinating, and the website is also worth investigating, to see the things that didn't make the cut, and photos of the artefacts.
> 
> The thing about murder and cats is his vague recollection that in Agatha Christie's _A Murder Is Announced_ , the vicar's cat is called Tiglath-Pileser.
> 
> But you knew that!


End file.
